Law & Disorder —

R.E.M.: Everybody Hurts (without network neutrality)

Musicians weigh in on network neutrality, arguing that an open Internet is …

Net neutrality isn't just an issue for policy wonks and communications lawyers, and the boys from R.E.M. want the FCC to know just how crucial a neutral 'Net remains for artists of all stripes. Or, to put it another way: it's the end of the world as we know it (without network neutrality).

In comments filed with the FCC this week, the band recounted the bad old days in Athens, Georgia, stuffing envelopes and mailing out issues of their fan newsletter a few thousand copies at a time. "These were the days of Xerox copies and homemade fanzines, self-addressed stamped envelopes, carbon sheets in triplicate, brother typewriters and desk calendars," said the band. "From the standpoint of communication, they were good only in that one had nothing with which to compare them."

Then came the Internet, and R.E.M. collectively felt like shiny, happy people; the new distribution was a wake-up bomb, exploding all the old ways of doing business and enabling a much closer connection to fans. "Today, just like every band in the second decade of this millennium, R.E.M. is armed to the hilt with the latest of the requisite Web-based tools, which makes communication with fans not only easy but also fast. It's a structure dependent on bandwidth, website hits, downloads, Twitter accounts, blogs, fansites, RSS feeds, Facebook and Myspace pages, apps, You Tube channels, Feedjit, and HTML newsletters."

Net neutrality is... automatic for the people?

How does this relate to net neutrality? Well, the sidewinder may be sleeping tonight, but tomorrow he could wake up and bite you in the foot. So to speak. And then your foot would swell up and have to be amputated, and you would be footless.

"Minus open access to the convenience and immediacy of the Web-based social networking tools, it’s not so hard to imagine a return to a time when they weren’t around," writes the band.

"So let's preserve this seamless flow of information between artist and fan and recognize that Net Neutrality is critical to the conservation of this dynamic. It doesn’t matter if you’re a band or a blogger: the open internet provides access to the same platform for communication as a large corporation or even a government agency. R.E.M. opposes any strictures that would prohibit this access."

Erin McKeown's "Grand" idea

The effort to get bands involved in the process has been an ongoing one for the Future of Music Coalition, which is behind the latest push to have artists weigh in before the comment period closes soon. The Coalition has put together a very nice tool for crafting and submitting comments to the FCC—and it has the great virtue of providing guidance without offering a form letter as an option.

While R.E.M/'s high-profile endorsement of net neutrality is interesting, a far longer and more informative comment comes from singer/songwriter Erin McKeown. She's not as well-known as R.E.M. (yet), but her album Sing You Sinners was certainly one of 2007's highlights (her newest effort isn't bad, either).

The great virtue of McKeown's three-page comment is the passion that infuses it; this is a working musician who plays 200 gigs a year and is absolutely dependent on the Internet to power her career.

"I use it to disseminate information to my fans (tour dates, record releases, etc.), maintain a virtual storefront for my music and other merchandise, and interact with fans via my blog, social networks and my youtube channel," she says. "I communicate with my support team—agent, manager, label, etc.—mainly via the Internet and use my website both publicly and privately to present new work, move large files, and facilitate business transactions. I have more than a thousand Twitter followers, more than 2,500 Facebook fans and an e-mail list of over 10,000. To me, this represents the power of an independent artist to reach audiences across multiple platforms, all made possible by the internet."

She's also an innovator. In the summer of 2009, she produced a set of "Cabin Fever" house concerts from her own rural home and streamed them over the Internet to fans who paid for a subscription to the series or who purchased individual show passes. The money helped pay for the recording of her newest album.

McKeown isn't naive about what's going on with illegal file-sharing, either, but she thinks the focus on tackling it has often been misguided.

As a copyright owner and someone who makes a substantial portion of their income from record sales, the rise of illegal filesharing via the internet has had a direct and detrimental affect on my bottom line. However, I view with great dismay some of the tactics that ISPs, record labels, and copyright owners employ to disproportionately punish illegal downloaders. I believe we should shift the debate and resources away from punishing and policing and more toward the question of “how can we make being a creative person a viable vocation?” I do not think illegal downloading of content can be currently mitigated in any way that doesn’t impact privacy, fair use and the lawful exchange of material — audio, or otherwise. Future policy should not be guided by punitive or restrictive approaches, but rather by answering a basic question: does the policy inhibit expression and the cultural/economic potential of creative people?

She also has little time for those who argue that network neutrality would destroy competition, since "as I see it, there’s not a lot of competition to begin with. Net neutrality rules would be necessary and positive provisions that would encourage innovation and protect consumers (and creators’) right to expression."

Such comments will be music to the ears (no pun intended) of the FCC's net neutrality backers, though both McKeown and R.E.M. perhaps make a better case for universal access and better speeds than they do for "neutrality."

Still, kudos to Future of Music for organizing some worthwhile comments that let the FCC understand just how crucial the Internet has become to artists. Such views from the real world are necessary supplements to the more theoretical debates about policy that often take place in DC. And if they come from acts as classy as McKeown and R.E.M., so much the better.